Defining Innovation

Organizational innovation refers to new ways work can be organized, and accomplished within an organization to encourage and promote competitive advantage. It encompasses how organizations, and individuals specifically, manage work processes in such areas as customer relationships, employee performance and retention, and knowledge management.

At the core of organizational innovation is the need to improve or change a product, process or service. All innovation revolves around change – but not all change is innovative. Organizational innovation encourages individuals to think independently and creatively in applying personal knowledge to organizational challenges. Therefore, organizational innovation requires a culture of innovation that supports new ideas, processes and generally new ways of “doing business”.

The Benefit of an Innovative Organization

In promoting a culture of innovation organizations should foster:

– Cross functional team building while discouraging silo building

– Independent, creative thinking to see things from a new perspective and putting oneself outside of the parameters of a job function

– Risk taking by employees while lessening the status quo

The value and importance of knowledge and learning within organizational innovation is crucial. If innovation is about change, new ideas, and looking outside of oneself to understand ones environment, then continuous learning is a requirement of organizational innovation success.

The value of learning and knowledge can only be realized once put into practice. If new organizational knowledge doesn’t result in change, either in processes, business outcomes, or increased customers or revenues, then its value hasn’t been translated into success.

The road to organizational innovation lies in the ability to impart new knowledge to company employees and in the application of that knowledge. Knowledge should be used for new ways of thinking, and as a stepping stone to creativity and toward change and innovation.

Steps to Innovation

To determine how supportive your current environment is in fostering innovation read the frequently asked questions and answers below, about how to build an organizational culture that encourages innovation.

1) Is a climate of innovation supported by senior management?

a. That means, that such activities as risk taking and small ad hoc work groups that brainstorm and talk through ideas need to be promoted, supported and encouraged in the organization.

2) Do managers routinely identify and bring together those individuals more oriented toward innovation those willing to think new ideas and act on them?

a. Identifying new thinkers and individuals oriented toward change helps to ensure an outlet for innovation by supporting these individuals and giving them and like-minded colleagues the time and opportunity to think creatively. This is tantamount to becoming an innovative organization.

3) Is there a process in place monitoring innovation teams and identifying what has and hasn’t worked as a result of them?

a. Maintaining and monitoring innovation is important. This requires checks and balances that identifies how innovation is developed and managed and processes that capture what did or didn’t work. In order to be able to continue to innovate in a changing environment, continually monitoring the internal and external environment to determine what supports or hinders innovation is key.

4) How can an organization be strategic and focused on it goals yet build and develop an innovative culture?

a. The value of a strategic focus remains important to a company’s success. In fact, clear direction and understanding of a company’s mission can help fuel innovation – by knowing where in the organization innovation and creativity would provide the most value. An innovative organizational culture creates a balance between strategic focus, and the value of new ideas and processes in reaching them.

5) Is there a single most important variable or ingredient that fuels an organization toward an innovative culture?

a. Similar to other successes of an organization, what drives innovation are the people of the organization. First, management must set the expectation of innovation and creativity and then “doing business” is about how to improve processes, products and customer relationships on a day-to-day basis. This mindset itself will create an ongoing culture of innovation.

Much has been written about changing organizational culture. It’s an exciting topic because of the enormous potential benefits derived from changing an organization’s culture. While exciting because of its enormous potential, attempting to change organizational culture can lead to enormous frustration.

It is important to understand how deeply the roots of organizational culture go. Organizational culture is rooted in the shared tacit assumptions of the organization. These tacit beliefs drive behavior throughout the organization.

Edgar Schein believes organizational culture provides members of the organization “stability, consistency, and meaning.” The change agent who threatens those three things will surely meet strong resistance.

Schreyoegg, Oechsler, and Waechter (three German researchers) believe organizational culture provides members with a worldview: how to perceive, how to conceptualize, and how to make decisions.

In my book, “Strategic Organizational Change,” I offered six reasons for organizational culture’s stubborn resistance to change:

1. it is implicit rather than explicit

2. it is woven into everyday practice

3. it leads to uniform thinking and behavior

4. it is historically rooted

5. it guides all decision making

6. it is used to socialize newcomers

The main reason changing organizational culture is so difficult is that it resides in the dark, unexamined recesses of the corporate mind. The unexamined assumptions that make up the organizational culture have not been questioned in years.

We know that most organizational culture change efforts fail. We know that organizational culture changes that succeed only do so after a frustrating uphill-battle against the status quo. We know that powerful organizational members have a vested interest in maintaining the status quo.

So, my question to you is this: Should an organization spend its limited resources (time, energy, and money) to change the organization’s culture? My answer is “yes.” Let me explain.

Organizational culture change is necessary to support almost all organizational change efforts (strategic, structural, or process). Organizational change efforts will fail if organizational culture remains fundamentally the same. The effectiveness of organizational change efforts requires embedding improvement strategies in the organizational culture.

Changes in procedures remain superficial and short-lived unless there are fundamental changes in values, ways of thinking, and approaches to problem solving. The resisting forces will simply renew their efforts to re-establish the old status quo.

Cameron and Quinn bluntly state, “The status quo will prevail. We repeat! Without culture change, there is little hope of enduring improvement in organizational performance.”

Cameron and Quinn offer the following hints for change agents:

1. Find something easy to change first.

2. Build coalitions of supporters.

3. Set targets for incremental completions.

4. Share information/reduce rumors.

5. Define how results will be measured.

6. Reward desired behaviors.

Organizational cultural change can be slow and frustrating, but the benefits can include dramatically improved organizational performance.

It’s always interesting to hear people discuss the question “How do we manage change?” Organizational change presents a constant concern for leaders. In fact, the question of change brings up the idea that change is often something that suddenly is out of hand and uncontrollable.

Here’s the business and organization reality; change is a part of growth in organizations and in life. In fact, change is happening on a constant basis. You can find ways to measure this change so it doesn’t happen by surprise. Here are some important basic concepts that will help you recognize issues related to change and change management.

The first concept is that organizations are “open systems.” That means they are a part of the world around them and they are open to the influences of the world around them. Recognizing changes for organizations means staying aware of what’s happening outside as well as inside of the organization.

An open system is influenced by both internal and external forces. Internal forces can be controlled from within the organization while external forces effect the organization but these can’t be controlled by the organization.

Internal forces that affect any organization include its products or service lines, leadership and management structures, policies and procedures, human resources, marketing strategies, and operations. These are directly controlled by organization leadership and should be influenced by external changes.

Some external forces include the political, economic, financial educational, societal changes that directly affect the organization’s industry, location, product, people and stakeholders.

Both internal and external forces can be watched and monitored in order to predict to the best of the organization leaders ability, the impacts any changes in these forces will have on the organization. For instance, if politicians change a law that directly affects how your industry exchanges goods and services, this will change internal operations of the organization. If prices of gas and oil increase and the income levels of people who purchase cars remains relatively the same, the car industry would need to make adjustments to respond to the needs and economic situation of the buying market.

All parts of a system must work in harmony for greatest effectiveness. Change often goes array in organizations because the effects of that change on various departments is often overlooked. In other words, change in one area of the organization has a ripple effect on other areas. Say for instance, marketing decides that products need to be shipped faster in order to increase customer service. The marketing department creates marketing materials promising faster shipping. However, the shipping department is the ones that have to make the faster shipping happen. They need to inform the marketing department about whether or not faster shipping is possible. This means also looking at the production department to see if products are available faster on a regular basis. It also includes accounting and of course human resources. In other words, every part of the organization system must get involved in a change for it to be effective.

Society influences changes in the desires of your target market. It is important to watch how society is influencing the buying habits of people in your target market group. While your company provides a particular type of product or service you have to be sure you’re relating in a contemporary manner to the rapidly changing ideas of what’s in or out for your target market group. For instance, if you target young people, you’ll have to constantly change your inventory to keep up with their changing interests. Some companies fail to make change quickly enough at price points that fit the buying ability of their target group.

Keep your finger on the pulse point of the consumer market. In other words, keep looking outward in order to bring new ideas inward. Hold focus group meetings of people in your target market or let consumers ‘touch” your products. Companies that set up stations that allow people to try their products have a way to conduct real time research by watching reactions and seeing what keeps people coming back. Even in highly self service industries, company sales people can be trained to ask more questions about buying interests and what the consumer wants. Collect this data to recognize coming changes you need to meet.

Change is going to happen because the world will never stand still. Setting up systems to collect information is an important and basically simple way to stay informed of coming changes. Awareness for change takes place at all levels of the organization. You can move from simple data collection and awareness systems to more complex forms of forecasting to be sure you are controlling change instead of it controlling you.

How do organizations assign power and authority? How do organizations assign tasks and functions? How do organizations assign resources and personnel? What is the correlation between organizational structure and strategy? Does structure determine strategy or does strategy determine structure? The answers to these strategic questions are critical to the formulation of effective organizational strategy and optimal differentiation-horizontal and vertical that allows organizations to create and sustain competitive advantage in the global marketplace.

In this review, we examine some pertinent and extant academic literature on effective organizational strategy and optimal organizational differentiation that facilitate and sustain competitive advantage in the global marketplace. As noted in the relevant academic literature, organization’s strategy is its plan for the whole business that sets out how the organization will use its resources-tangible and intangible to accomplish stated goals and objectives while organization’s structure is the way the units of an organization are integrated internally. Organizational structure also describes the connections with its external environment-corporate publics, and planned outcomes. For an organization to execute its plans efficiently and effectively, the strategy and the structure must be internally consistent and integrated seamlessly.

Further, organizational design is a formalized process of integrating people, resource, strategic and operational intelligence, and technology across an organization while organizational structure addresses the questions: Who does what and who reports to whom? Indeed, organizational structure is the formal distribution of power, authority, and roles in an organization designed to achieve goals efficiently and effectively while organizational behavior is the study of the way people interact within groups. The study of organizational behavior is designed to create more efficient and effective organizations. The central idea of the study of organizational behavior is that a scientific approach can be applied to the management of power, authority, tasks, processes, employees and responsibilities.

In the extant academic literature, differentiation is the series of processes that organization uses to assign power, authority, resources-tangible and intangible and employees to achieve its strategic and operational goals. The processes of differentiation determine the relationships between managers and employees. Horizontal differentiation occurs as managers and employees receive their assignments for various tasks and vertical differentiation describes assignment of power and authority within an organization.

As first postulated in Exodus, Jethro differentiation: Vertical differentiation is the process of allocating power and authority while horizontal differentiation is the process of allocating tasks and functions within an organization. The process of horizontal differentiation begins with delegation of specialized tasks to employees. This form of differentiation averts an organization from having only one employee or a few employees assigned to carry out multiple tasks. The process also allows the organization’s managers and employees to specialize and stay within tasks related to their field of expertise.

The process of vertical differentiation involves the establishment of a “chain of command” among employees and managers. Vertical differentiation segregates management into strategic, executive and transactional while horizontal differentiation segregates employees into functional areas: Operations; research and development; accounting and finance; marketing and sales; and human capital management.

Some Operational Guidance

In practice, while organizational structure focuses on the entire organization, strategy formulation and implementation involves assigning individuals to tasks and timelines that will help an organization reach its stated goals and objectives. A well-designed organizational structure can streamline operations, improve decision-making, facilitate employees’ cooperation, collaboration and performance. Efficient and effective strategy formulation and implementation requires a good fit between organizational strategy and structure.

Differentiation and Integration

Generally, organizations use differentiating mechanism to assign employees to different tasks and functions while integrating mechanism is used to coordinate different units and employees to ensure that everyone is working toward efficient and effective accomplishment of organizational goals and objectives.

When an organization effectively bring its different units together under a visionary leader or coordinated strategic direction, an organization is said to be well-integrated. Integration leads to a unified and cohesive organizational structure. Successful organization selects between differentiated and integrated organizational structure depending on industry structure-degree of competition, stage of industry life cycle, its competitive position, leadership and resources-tangible and intangible.

There is substantive and gathering empirical evidence in the relevant academic literature suggesting that successful organizations tend to be more differentiated and integrated than less successful organizations. As organizations grow, they evolve and differentiate into more and more functional areas: Operations; research and development; accounting and finance; marketing and sales; and human capital management.

Structure and Strategy

Organizational structure improves strategic and operational efficiency by providing clarity to employees at all levels of an organization. Efficient and effective organizational structure encourages collaboration and facilitate performance of functional areas of an organization by focusing time and energy on productive tasks. In addition, well-designed organizational structure plays an important role in strategy formulation and implementation. Therefore, organizational structure is critical to an organization’s success, addressing the who, what, when, where, why, and how of reaching desired goals and objectives. Moreover, organizational structure determines how power, authority, resources, roles and responsibilities are planned, coordinated, controlled, and assigned, and how information flows among the different levels of organizational management: Strategic, executive and transactional.

Finally, successful organizations implement strategic coordination among its various units to leverage synergistic opportunities inherent in any strategy. Indeed, to out-perform their competitors, successful organizations must design appropriate structure and formulate optimal strategy that maximize its profit or benefit producing capacity while minimizing the cost of operations simultaneously.

In sum, a well-designed organizational structure that is properly aligned with organizational strategy is required to create and sustain competitive advantage in the global marketplace. Whether organizational strategy is shaped by industry structure as posited by structuralists or industry structure is reconstructed by organizational strategy as postulated by reconstructionists, the most critical requirement is an effective alignment of organizational strategy and structure, ceteris paribus.

Conflict, like death and taxes, is inevitable. This is especially true in today’s diverse environments where people can have dramatically different values, communication styles, work styles, and personality types. Fortunately, conflict does not have to negatively impact our lives. In fact, many organizational conflicts can be prevented, or at least minimized, if we take 10 proactive steps.

1. Provide conflict resolution training. You can reduce the negative impact of conflict by helping employees develop the skills they need to successfully resolve the conflicts that occur in their lives. This gives people more confidence in their ability to resolve both personal and professional conflict. It also makes people more effective at addressing minor conflicts as they occur, instead of allowing them to become major distractions.

2. Provide communication skills training. By providing communication skills training, employees can increase their ability to communicate effectively with a diverse range of individuals, and manage the communication problems that are often at the heart of organizational conflict.

3. Help staff develop positive work relationships. Give employees a chance to get to know each other better, and to feel more comfortable with each other. This can be done by providing opportunities for social interaction on a continuous basis, by giving assignments that put staff into contact with people they don’t normally interact with, and by providing cross-training opportunities.

4. Implement team building activities. You can significantly improve team relationships and performance through the team development process. Such activities provide an opportunity for team members to get more comfortable with each other, to identify acceptable behaviors and modes of interaction, and to determine how team problems and conflicts will be resolved.

5. Develop strong communication channels. You can improve communication within a team or organization by strategically employing informational and problem-solving meetings, and by utilizing a diverse range of organizational communication tools. Such tools include face-to-face discussions, e-mail, texting, videoconferences, online meetings, bulletin boards (both physical and electronic), voice mail and faxes.

6. Create an environment that encourages participation. This can be done through formal employee involvement programs such as self-directed work teams, and suggestion systems that ask for employee input and reward people for their participation. This is especially important because research has consistently shown that employee involvement programs have a positive impact on both individual and organizational performance.

7. Provide conflict mediation training for leaders. No matter how hard you work at reducing dysfunctional conflict (conflict that hinders performance and prevents you from achieving organizational goals), sooner or later it is going to occur. Therefore, organizational leaders should develop their conflict mediation skills so they can help employees resolve the conflicts that will inevitably arise.

8. Provide third-party conflict mediation services. There will be times when a manager or supervisor cannot mediate a conflict between employees. During these times, it helps if employees feel they have an experienced, objective third-party where they can confidentially address a conflict situation.

9. Make sure employees are clear about organizational goals and priorities. Generally speaking, conflicts occur because of differences over facts, goals, methods or values. By ensuring that employees (especially the members of a given work team) are on the same page regarding objectives, priorities and plans, you will decrease the chances that dysfunctional conflict will occur due to differences over facts, goals or methods.

10. Treat everyone fairly. This may seem obvious, but many managers are accused of preferential treatment, and it is incumbent upon organizational leaders to make sure they are behaving in an egalitarian fashion. Even the appearance of preferential behavior can create conflict situations.

1. Stop Sending So Many Emails

Sometimes it’s much better to handle something in person or over the phone than using email. You should learn how to recognize such situations otherwise you may find yourself buried under replies to your emails. Generally, email is great for communicating well-formulated messages that require, at most, a simple confirmation. It’s much less suitable for extended group conversations where multiple participants share their thoughts with others.

2. Start Reading Your Emails Regularly

We know that the last thing you want to do before or after work is read work-related emails, but that’s how things have to be if you want to become an efficient email organizer. Depending on how many emails you receive every day, it may take just a couple of days or even hours for your inbox to start overflowing with new, unread emails. By reading your emails regularly, you ensure that the situation never gets too out of hand.

3. Start Checking Your Emails Throughout the Day

There’s no excuse for not owning a smartphone these days. Regardless of which email service you use, there’s a way how to make it work on all major mobile operating systems. Having your email on the phone allows you to easily read new emails throughout the day, which can drastically reduce the length of your scheduled email-reading sessions, the importance of which we’ve described in the previous chapter.

4. Start Using an Email Client

Web-based email services are great because you can conveniently access them from anywhere, even when far away from your own personal computer. But even the best web-based user interface can’t rival the features and convenience of dedicated email clients such as Outlook or Mailbird. Email clients are faster, can display emails from multiple email services in a single window, support keyboard shortcuts, come with powerful spellchecking capabilities, and are available for all operating systems and devices.

We’ve already mentioned Outlook and Mailbird, which are arguably the most popular email clients for Windows, but there’s also Airmail, an email client for iPhone and macOS by Italian company Bloop SRL, Postbox, a desktop email client and feed reader for Windows and macOS written and sold by Postbox, Inc., or Mozilla Thunderbird, a free and open-source cross-platform email client developed by the Mozilla Foundation, just to name a few available options.

5. Stop Subscribing to Newsletters

Websites and companies love email newsletters because they allow them to maintain engagement and sell products with minimal effort. While some newsletters are clearly valuable, most, sooner or later, end up being ignored. You may think that it’s no big deal to subscribe to a newsletter-after all, you can always unsubscribe later-but experience tells us that things tend to become unmanageable much quicker than it initially seems. We recommend you stop subscribing to all newsletters as a rule of thumb and use other communication channels instead to receive information from websites and companies, such as social media networks or RSS.

6. Start Using Multiple Mailboxes

Why have just one mailbox for everything when you can have several and use a different one for each of the things you do. You can start, for example, with one mailbox for work-related emails and one mailbox for personal emails. Some people like to take things further and use a privacy-oriented email service such as ProtonMail for potentially sensitive personal communication and a free and convenient email service such as Gmail for web services and online shopping. Another advantage of this approach comes in the form of better security. Having some degree of separation between various activities minimizes the impact of an email breach and gives malicious hackers less information to work with.

My dream is to live in a self-organizing home where everything falls into its place automatically and you don’t have to care of any of the home organization or cleaning tasks.

Of course, this is not realistic (maybe in the future it is) and we always have to do the organization and cleaning at least to some extent by ourselves.

Here you can find five tips to automate your decluttering and cleaning actions at least a bit, in some cases even completely.

Outsource your cleaning

This one is on the top of my wish list: outsource the cleaning completely. I would just love to enter a home which is clean and where you don’t have to take care of the cleaning by yourself. By outsourcing, you free up your time for other meaningful tasks.

Currently I’m not doing this, but hopefully I am in the near future. Sure, it costs, but I would pay for getting rid of this task completely and having time to do something else.

Outsource your window washing

I clean my windows two times a year and every time I try to find reasons for not doing this. I find this task to be hard and tedious. However, I want to take care of my windows, so there is no way around this.

I haven’t tried this, but I would assume it’s cheaper to outsource just your window cleaning than hiring someone to clean your whole household.

Once again, it costs money, but it saves your time and your nerves and gives you time to something more fun.

Use advanced technology for cleaning

Even the cleaning technology goes forward all the time and one example of this is robot vacuum cleaners. I haven’t used one for cleaning, but as much as I have heard from my friends, it truly helps in their cleaning efforts, at least a bit. And less time you use for manual vacuum cleaning the better.

Hire a Professional Organizer

The same way you can outsource your cleaning, you can outsource your home organization as well. I haven’t used any of the services provided by Professional Organizer, but instead of you taking care of the organization, they are doing it for a certain fee.

Turn your bills to electronic

If possible, you can turn your bills electronic. This way you can reduce the paper clutter that comes into your home by mail. I love this small step, since the less I have to deal with paper bills the better.

Several personal leadership characteristics are essential for a leader to possess in order to effectively lead and transform an organization. These personal characteristics describe the aspect of leadership better known as transformational leadership, leadership that seeks to transform not only the organization but also the followers’ vision of “what is” to “what can be”. The following highlights four characteristics that leaders exhibit when effectively leading organizational transformations.

Possess Self-Confidence and Belief in Ones Own Abilities:

One of the first personal characteristics that a transformational leader must possess is confidence and a belief in their own abilities to truly influence and change the present course and action of an organization. Studies have shown that possessing high self-confidence, self-determination and inner purpose and direction are positively associated with transformational leaders. Leaders who have confidence in their abilities to influence change and their environment don’t rely on luck or chance to make things happen. They see themselves as “enablers” and the source of “energy” to drive the transformation.

Purposefully Inspire and Energize People to Act:

Effective leaders are able to purposefully inspire and energize people to act in a direction towards a goal they have helped them understand is worthy and meaningful. Therefore, the transformational leaders must possess the ability to create and communicate a powerful vision that will excite the minds of their followers, inspiring them to go “beyond” their current boundaries. This is an essential leadership characteristic because it is the ability to define and communicate the purpose of the transformation in a meaningful way to the organization that enables its members to effectively take up their own personal banners in support of the larger goal.

Develop, Communicate and Continually Sell the Vision:

Developing and communicating the vision is just the beginning. An effective transformational leader must also be able to continually sell the vision, and continually convince others to climb on board, stick it out, whether in good times or bad. How a leader “frames’ the future and the organizations’ purpose is critical for long-term support. This can be illustrated in a story that has been passed down concerning relies from three brick layers when asked about their job. When the first bricklayer was asked what job he was doing, he replied “I am laying bricks, one on top on each other”. When the second bricklayer was asked what he was doing he replied “I am building a great wall”. However, when the third bricklayer was asked what he was doing he replied “I am changing the world! I am building a new gateway to the west. A place where people from all over the world will have an opportunity to come and visit new places, meet new people, make new friends. I am building one of the most advanced travel facilities in the world. Millions of people will benefit from the work I am doing. This airport will change lives!” The difference in how each brick layer saw their same job is an example of how important it is for an effective leader to create, communicate and “frame” the future purpose of the organization. The first two bricklayers where doing their jobs, however, the third bricklayer was inspired and motivated because he was changing the world.

Be a Change Leader, Innovator and Coach:

Finally, three additional characteristics that are essential for being a transformational leader include being a change leader, an innovator and an effective coached. First, change is and will continue to be a constant for all organizations. Therefore, transformational leaders must also be change leaders, having the willingness and ability to change that which is being done to something that has possibly never been done before. They need to be able to be seen as abandoning today in search of a better tomorrow. Second, the effective leader must welcome and encourage innovation while encouraging others to develop new and innovative concepts for solving tomorrow’s problems and delivering world class solutions. They know that the ideas and thinking that created the current state are not the same ones needed to create a better tomorrow. Therefore, effective leaders know how important it is to encourage and reward “new thinking” and “new thoughts” in order to move the organization to a new place. And third, an effective transformational leader must be willing and able to be a coach and advisor to their followers and know if they have the right team and individuals to support the transformation going forward. Not all people are at the same level of ability and readiness to transform. Understanding their readiness level to transform and change is critical to being able to determine the timing and expectations for the transformation. Therefore, the effective leader must know the level of support that is needed by the organization as well as the individuals being led. By doing so, the effective leader will be able to make the “right connections” and “partner” effectively with their organization by training and developing followers where needed and ultimately positioning everyone to successfully execute and deliver new value to the organization.

Usually workflow & messaging is realized in CRM and then transactions are just logged into Accounting/ERP/MRP. In the case of Microsoft Business Solutions products: Microsoft Great Plains, Navision, Solomon, Axapta the natural CRM choice would be Microsoft CRM. However typical CRM application targets Sales automation, which is usually not applicable to government structure, non-profit or public company (community services, public utilities, churches, charities, etc.). Not-for-profit organization needs purchasing and requisition workflow, payroll approval workflow, and in certain cases special General Ledger (GL) transactions workflow. Microsoft CRM doesn’t provide the functionality. Then how could this be realized? We’ll provide two scenarios to realize this customization:

o Lotus Notes/Domino approach. In Great Plains you could realize either Great Plains Dexterity triggers or MS SQL database trigger on certain events (Purchase Order creation, Payroll Transaction, GL transaction). This event calls COM+ application and this one in turn creates Lotus objects via Java agent (Lotus Notes Domino should be version 6.0 or newer). This is basically the bridge. Then in Lotus you have to design workflow – but this is natural task for Lotus and it is not difficult. Users should work in Lotus to get transactions approved and when it should be posted in Great Plains – Lotus calls SQL script against Great Plains company database. Developer should know Microsoft Great Plains tables structure

o Microsoft Exchange/Outlook approach. This is the second way – when you do not want to deploy Lotus Domino, and would be OK with simple messaging and notification through Microsoft Exchange. The technical realization should either involve Dexterity or SQL trigger, calling COM object (Dexterity) or simply sending notification email from MS SQL Server. The scenario to post or take off hold from Great Plains transaction could be realized via MS Exchange event sink – this MS Exchange event handler will check all the messages and when the one has certain criteria – it calls MS SQL Server stored procedure in the Great Plains company database

o Programming Tools. Java agent to address Lotus – you need either Sun JDK or somewhat more advanced: VisualCafe or JBuilder. Great Plains Dexterity trigger should be done in Dexterity IDE – this language requires expertise and it is difficult to code without experience, Microsoft Exchange event sink should be programmed in Visual Studio as COM+ application, then you need to register COM+ application through Control Panel->System->Component Services

o Feasibility. To be honest and do not set unrealistic expectations – this Workflow implementation is pretty serious project and we do not recommend if for small non-profit organization – it is rather for large and mid-size-to-large structure.

We encourage you to analyze your alternatives. You can always appeal to our help, give us a call: 1-866-528-0577 or 1-630-961-5918, help@albaspectrum.com

Culture, it is something leaders must develop within their organizations to achieve world class. It is also one of the most daunting tasks a new or existing leader must confront within their society. This is the first step, to have a perspective of society and not a perspective of organization. Changing culture might have the effect of changing the organization structure but it is the people who will accept or hang on to an existing culture. It is extremely difficult to change because it can stem from many years of development.

Take the historical examples of the French society within Canada and the American civil war. Since the first European settlement (New France) in Canada, around 1605, a French society has continued a want for a sovereign country. The latest effort was the Quebec sovereignty movement referendum in 1980. This stems from cultural, social, and political differences. This culture continues with some parts of the society today. The civil war ended in 1865 with a violent conclusion and the North and South developed into two distinct and very different regions.

President Lincoln tried various policies to restore Union held areas of the Confederacy to their “proper relationship” with the federal government. To most of these people Reconstruction meant the period of federal intervention in the South. This concern of federal government intervention remains today. These cultural examples, of course, are outside of any specific business organization but they are examples of; once a culture is established it is extremely difficult to change. The advantage a business organization has is the societies are small. The environment, communication, attitudes, values, knowledge, and motives can all be influenced in a relative shorter period of time if certain steps are taken. Here are four must steps to develop the required business culture for achieving both a competitive advantage and engaged employees:

1. Start with a single focus strategy. Strategies like “We want to be the best in low cost, quality, and service”, is ambiguous for most of the people. Which one is it during decision time? Determine which element of the business, if achieved, would also improve other key elements of the business. Herb Kelleher who was one of the founders of Southwest Airlines maintained and based all of the organizations decisions on the single focus strategy of “Southwest is THE low fare airline”. He would tell his employees I can teach you to be CEO of Southwest Airlines in 5 minutes and he would then tell them they just had to base their decisions on this single focus strategy.

2. Establish a Management Steering Team consisting of all departmental leaders. The Management Steering Team is responsible for the governance of the organization. The departmental managers are the first society who must be committed to the single focus strategy and an aligned culture. On the very first meeting of this steering team get each departmental manager to describe the culture within their departments. How do they make decisions, what motivates their team, what are their values, how do they share knowledge, and how is this different from the organization overall and why?

3. Describe what the expected culture is. Is it continuous improvement, customer focused, learning, innovative, collaboration, external relationships, transformational, or hierarchy? First and foremost you must align your company culture with your single focus strategy and the goals within that strategy. Brainstorm with your management steering team to understand what it will look like, how it will change habits, the standard to set, how people will react, and what and how people will learn. What will be the future state?

4. Communication. The communication of both the single focus strategy and the expected culture has to be daily. It is the responsibility of the Management Steering Team. It is most effective when integrated with Standard Work for Managers. While on their daily Gemba walk all managers must have developed standard work to execute. They must be looking for opportunities to communicate and model the culture. Actively listening and observing behavior. Knowledge sharing is part of the standard work, what the organization has to learn in order to develop the expected culture. A visual value stream is installed where results of the strategy are continuously updated so real time decisions and road block removal can be accomplished at a fast pace. Visual management can also promote culture through symbols like logo’s, uniforms, and types of rewards for high performers. The Nike “swoosh” symbol and the “Just Do It” logo has come to stand for athletic excellence and achievement and a spirit of determination.

As the leader take some time to determine your organization’s culture, is it aligned? These four steps are required and if followed will lead you to a culture of achievement.